[OpenIndiana-discuss] Gnome and the future

[Udo Grabowski (IMK)]

On 11/ 1/12 03:56 PM, Ron Parker wrote:
> Maybe I'm the oddball in the bunch. But I've been running OpenIndiana
> as my "desktop" OS on my laptop at work since OI-147 was released two
> years ago.
> ...
 > There is no reason OI could not make a good
> working desktop. It's been fine for my needs for two years now. I
> suspect given another 5 years or so we may see such. I just wish it
> was today. I don't need GNOME 3, KDE 4, Unity or Ubuntu. I do need
> modern laptop hardware to be supported.

You are not alone. We run all our workstations on OI-151a7, as well
as all our file servers, and all our compute blades, in total 140
hosts of a couple of brands and different architectures, with
Infiniband, CIFS, VLans (even on the workstations), and all that was
spawned from carefully prepared single image based on OI! We are
doing really serious science on these boxes (we are burning 15 Mio
CPU hours per year constantly under 100% CPU load on the blades,
handling about 400 TB data on the fileservers, and a similar amount
offsite on PB-scale storage units, and absolutely need the desktop
for expensive visualization and daily work, and have also written
programs that need gtk2/Gnome. Not to speak of all the visualization
packages in perl and python, wxWidgets, IDL, WebGL, that are not
possible without a decent desktop, native 3D capable system.

Gnome 2 is perfect (apart from a few annoying bugs), Gnome3/Unity
would be a drawback indeed, and nobody here wants to go back to
such basic stuff as xfce and other incapable desktop systems (KDE
may would be an option). As long as gtk3 is not needed by any programs
in use, there's no need to really do work in the gnome packages,
apart from some fixes. Schillix OS shows that this can be handled
even with just two people, so I don't see that this sucks up
significant manpower.

The current Gnome on OI works, there's absolutely no reason to
delete that from OI. If anybody only needs a server, deactivate the
desktop, maybe delete the gnome packages from your server, or install
one of the other great server-only illumos-based distributions,
but please don't obstruct the usability for other users by
cutting of functionality just based on opinions. It's a strength
and an unique feature of OI to be complete solution. We switched
to OI because nobody else in the world (apart from Oracle) offers
a real successor to OpenSolaris in it's full completeness.
Nobody wants Linux, the apparent gain in sheer package volume
comes with the drawback that you nearly always have to download
and recompile this or that software yourself just because it's
not compiled with all options needed, and often a whole chain needs
to be deinstalled and recompiled, and so it makes no difference for
us not to have a package offered or to have it offered in an unusable
configuration. And Linux is clearly inferior in a couple of aspects
that matter to us, apart from the fact that nobody here really has
the time to administer two different flavours of Unix (with all the
interoperability problems, e.g., in NFS), when one already does the
job very well.

Please accept that there are people that are doing much more with
OI than just running a home NAS server with music and videos. We
still feel that we are a legitimate part of the OI/illumos community,
and not just a legacy (yes, I know, the desktop is dead, blablabla...).

(And I just hate these unnecessary discussions!)
-- 
Dr.Udo Grabowski    Inst.f.Meteorology a.Climate Research IMK-ASF-SAT
www-imk.fzk.de/asf/sat/grabowski/ www.imk-asf.kit.edu/english/sat.php
KIT - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology            http://www.kit.edu
Postfach 3640,76021 Karlsruhe,Germany  T:(+49)721 608-26026 F:-926026